Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

I know what windows are. Within me I almost see them: half open, curtains of some thin transparent substance shifting in a breeze. I cannot see what lies outside them.

There should be windows.

WHEN I WOKE I saw a screen, flickering. A clock with too many numbers. The blankness broke then, into then and now, sleep and waking. In broken flashes I remembered: White clouds vanishing. Steam rising from a bowl.

What makes everything flicker so? Is it in this place, or is it me? Which would be worse?

Could there be something worse?

The numbers on the clocks are counting down.

THERE IS A door I cannot open. It lies across a path my legs keep taking. I found myself before it again, blank.

I reached out a hand. Its shadow trembled as it climbed the flat blue surface to touch my fingertips. The surface was so cold it seemed to seize me. I stood for a long time, held by the cold, feeling the hard surface beating with my pulse.

It took an effort to free myself, and more to keep from running as I went.

I STRUGGLED INTO waking, into light, into myself. The room lay as I had left it the night before, if that was night, if this is morning.

Night, morning. Evening. Light flickered, and I shuddered under it, falling back almost into memory of something vast, substantial, something to which I once belonged. A moon, almost full. Its light sleeking smooth black water.

Moon. I clutched at the word, held it, listening.

It told me only this: I do not belong here. I come from somewhere else.

What place could that have been? And if there is some other place, what place is this? Why are there no windows? What lies outside?

Is there an outside?

I WAKE. I wander. And I return each time to this screen. Like an open window, it draws me. I watch the letters flash onto the screen, rise, and vanish into what white space lies beyond its borders. I tap out messages to nowhere. No messages return.

I understand now that no one reads this. I do not think anyone will ever read this.

THERE IS A way to bring words back. There are keys that shift them from wherever they have gone. This discovery moves me in a way I cannot understand; I know only that, since I have found a way to bring words back, I cannot leave this screen. I am searching for something. I will know it when I find it, I tell myself.

Something flickers, stopping me. Stunned to silence, I gaze, dizzy, as if looking down from a great height.

Out of these endless rows of empty letters, I have recognized a word.

Discovery.

Is there such a word? Discovery. Discovery. Discovery. The more I look at it, the less it means.

I have spent hours searching. Words float up on a cold whisper in me— island, realm, domain —but on the screen itself I see only wave after featureless wave of words I cannot read.

But for Discovery. I can return, again and again, and find it always there, always the same. Discovery. Discovery. It makes my hand shake so I can barely press the keys.

The room leaps into being with a force that startles me.

I know what discovery means.

I will keep up this record. Someday I may discover how to read it. I may come back someday and find that I have written everything I want to know.

SINCE MY DISCOVERY yesterday, more words have returned. When I opened my eyes they seized on things, and as I saw I named them. I saw light panels, acoustic tile, the intercom, and a collection of tools I do not recognize as my own, but I know they include screwdrivers ( Phillips and Torx ), forceps, Metzenbaum scissors. My eyes fastened on these things as though they could feed hunger.

Hunger: I know that word as well. It drives me down the corridor to this galley, this kitchen, this cabinet, these bowls.

I stand at the counter and lift a spoonful steaming to my mouth. Sweet.

Anger flares as suddenly as what flickers from the emptiness. I have thrown the bowl across the room. It bounces violently and spins across the floor.

It should have shattered. I don’t know how I know that. I only know it should. And that it fell unnaturally slow. Even Earth is broken. Earth. I repeat the word until, diminished to a distant groaning in the floor, it fades.

What is Earth?

It has become like that. I had thought that my discovery, even if of one word, had made a difference. I had thought the emptiness had broken. I know differently. I am broken. I feel the emptiness more, now that one edge of it is lifted: its edges cut me, each new recovery telling me how much more remains in shroud.

At each encounter a new wound opens: as I stoop to wipe the gruel from the floor I flicker, and hear a voice speak reassuringly from far above my head. I look up, and only the blank white panel burns there, but as I blink in the light I feel warmth upon my skin, and hear a roaring hushed by distance. Warmth shudders through me, telling me how very cold this place is: how my fingertips are pale, and the mist that fills the air and fades in front of me is breath.

Now I smell what could be cold itself, the essence of it, sharp, penetrating: snow. It swirls around me, and I rise so suddenly the room whirls again and as all settles I am here again among so much I still cannot name. In a flicker I could disappear. I could vanish into mist. Or worse: in that flickering I might fail to vanish and remain, impaled on the moment when everything comes clear.

NOW I WAKE to worse than emptiness. With each day as more words return I see more clearly, sense distinctly — even the chill across my skin is sharper, punctate, each hair rising on my skin and pricking me with cold. Punctate; pricking: the words and sensations drive each other on, crowding me toward some end I cannot see except flickering among trees pierced through by sunlight, shadow stippling countless blades of grass. A pane of glass, crazed, doubling everything beyond. A black sphere rolling down a smooth, reflecting slope until this too drops away and I am standing in the corridor outside my room, the chill fuming off my skin. I see a river risen in flood, a legal document I cannot read, a diagram explaining the formation of hail, an enormous fish turning lazily, its outstretched pectoral fin transparent, and through it, through distortions of glass and water I almost see what lies beyond the glass: a sofa covered in a pastel blur, a vase of what might be tulips on the end table, beyond that a window, and through the window vague masses of trees, penetrated by sunlight.

There was a time when these visions, these memories, and the power to name them could have saved me. But now they only force me to acknowledge none of these things helps me. None of them approaches what I need to know. I begin to understand that there are questions I have forgotten. How did I come here? What am I? What happened to make me this shadow of a man?

Shaking off the image of a blue balloon against a bluer sky, I rise, unsteady, and down the corridor I weave among ghosts. In the walls, if I look too long, images surface almost near enough to see: ants circling endlessly around a pool of tar; a single sheet of paper fluttering as it falls; I see a drawer full of cutlery; a hook drawing yarn; I see stars.

I shake, and shake again. Even more than the pressure of these illusions the cold bears in on me. I cannot concentrate. My breath begins to come in gasps, the clouds lay frost on any surface I come near. I begin to understand something very simple: if this cold deepens I will die — another thing I have not seen though it is everywhere around me. Die: the word shudders through me. Before I understand it has become another long confusing spasm that will not release me until I fall to one knee. My hand burns in contact with the floor. I stand and stagger down the flickering corridors, blind to any purpose until I find myself in a cubicle full of screens.